Hardware Review

Wi-Fire

Ever since Apple’s engineers had the brilliant idea of enclosing their
laptops’ wireless antennas in a metal case, there have been third-party
solutions for improving the wireless range of Apple’s various laptops.
The Wi-Fire, a directional, high-gain 802.11 antenna by hField
Technologies that runs off of a free USB port, purports to be one such
device.

There’s only one problem: it doesn’t work.

Oh, you can connect the silly-looking panel to any USB-equipped Mac and
dangle it off the top of the screen or monitor. You can even point it at
your router using the directional arrow on top of the antenna casing.

But what you can’t do is actually use it to connect to a network.

There are at least two different software versions available, one of
which shipped on CD with the device. The other is available for download
at hField’s Web site. The CD version of the software, which is more
recent, is marginally more functional than the Web version.

Neither version would allow a PowerBook running Mac OS X 10.4.11 to
connect to a network, and both versions caused kernel_task to start
eating all available CPU cycles. The Web version hung the
SystemUIServer immediately on boot, causing the menu bar to freeze.
The CD version’s monitor and configuration application hung on every
quit, requiring multiple attempts to force-quit the application before
it finally went away.

The Web version wouldn’t even let the Wi-Fire see my router, sitting six
feet away from the computer with no walls or anything else in between
them. At least the CD version could see it, if not connect to it.

At the heart of the Wi-Fire is a Zydas ZD1211b chipset. As far as I can
tell, Zydas was bought by Atheros, which seemingly last updated the
driver in July 2006 and now no longer offers it for download. (I
apologize for the vagueness of the information here, but none of the
companies actually involved with writing the drivers or making the
chipset seems to want to admit to ever having done it, as there’s
literally nothing on Atheros’s Web site about the chipset, and Zydas
doesn’t appear to have any remaining Web presence.) It’s probably just
as well; the release notes from the CD version of the driver (4.5.70,
which appears to be the latest version) offer the following “known
issues:”

For an Intel-based system, the wireless network adapter
can’t work anymore after system restart. So please unplug
the wireless card before system restart.

For an Intel-based system, the wireless network
adapter can’t work anymore after system wake-up from the
sleep state. So please unplug the wireless card before
system entering sleep state.

For an Intel-based system, the driver will hang if the
wireless USB adapter keeps scanning before associating to
a [base station] successfully.

For a PPC-based system, the system would hang if you
unplug the wireless card while the card is scanning.

On a more positive note, the Wi-Fire has a very nice retractable USB
cable, even if the Wi-Fire does look a little silly perched there
loosely on the top of my screen. What it really needs is a padded clamp
to hold it more securely in place. The odd clamp/stand works much better
as a desk stand than as a means of attaching the Wi-Fire to a monitor.

Unfortunately, this product is doomed to failure on the Mac due to its
non-functional drivers and very un-Mac-like configuration/monitor
software. Keep the $80 for a wireless adapter or antenna with real Mac
drivers.

It's working right now using the software from the CD on my 1.25 ghz Powerbook with Leopard (10.5.2). But it is far from satisfactory.

First, it stops working whenever the machine sleeps. The software still shows a signal but Mail reports a network problem and will not connect even if restarted. Firefox goes offline and reports no connection when restarted. I can get it to work again by closing the software, unplugging the device, plugging it back in, and restarting the software.

Since I know nothing about networking I should also report that I have only used it with MetroFi's free service in San Jose, Ca. I don't know whether that could be a factor in the foregoing problem.

Second, the trackpad seems to perform sluggishly when this is plugged in. Could it be hogging the USB bus or something?

Third, the design is not only dorky for its lack of any firm attachment to the computer but is also extremely fragile looking. You will not want to toss this into a backpack without first packing it in the box it came in.

Fourth, you have to close Airport before it will work. Somewhere I saw a suggestion that having a second antenna close to your machine while your Airport transceiver is active can damage the latter. If this is true, forgetting to close Airport before plugging in this device could be an expensive mistake. It would be nice if the software checked the status of airport before letting this antenna fire up. But the software looks Beta at best.

if it truly uses the Atheros chipset you can download the drivers from the atheros site for leopard. my alfa works absolutely perfect on leopard, linux and xp. this unit would look a lot better if someone reported on the antenna and the monitor clip was better.

I'm running the wi-fire on my macbook right now and I haven't seen it crash like that. But apparently they're releasing a new update for the mac that should fix whatever happened to the people who complained. And I haven't heard that you need to turn off airport, cause I don't and it also works fine. Also, I agree that it could be less wobbly, but since mine works I think the really long range is worth readjusting it if it gets nudged. It doesn't seem that flimsy though, the plastic housing seems tough enough to throw into a backpack, since I do that sometimes. This review also seems out of date since it works on leopard for me too. Overall, this review seems pretty superficial, and it doesn't sound like they tried very hard, since it doesn't even sound like they tried to contact the company when it didn't work for them. It kinda sounded like they wanted it to fail... Maybe my computer and I are a complete fluke, but it works fine for me, and seems worth it overall.

The Wi-fire does in fact work, increasing signal maybe 50%, but not nearly as good as mfgr claims. A flimsy design requires rubber bands or duct tape to secure it, plus its software is buggy, causing me to have to reinstall it more than once to get the MacBook to run it reliably.

Worst problem came when ordering a second unit for a friend (not knowing at the time that better, competitive wifi products are now available) but it arrived DOA. I had to send several emails and leave phone messages to try to get the thing replaced, without results, and finally asked for an RMA. Suddenly, six weeks later a new unit--instead of a refund--arrived, but with no reimbursement for shipping their defective product back.

Compared to several other online electronic companies I've bought from, Wi-Fire's customer service is very poor, about the same as the stability of the device. I recommend checking Amazon and other web sources for better solutions than this one for improving improve Wifi reception.

Hfield has to be the lamest company for support that I have ever seen. I had to reinstall my wifire, so downloaded the drivers from their site. Wouldnt recognize the wifire. After reading their faqs I realize I needed v1 not v2. Lame part is, there is nowhere to download v1, just v2. Typical.

Spent several hours until I got WiFire working with a unibody aluminium Macbook, under MacOS 10.5.6. The drivers supplied on the CD (driver version 4.5.9) did not work, I could only scan WiFi but could not connect.

However, beta driver from this page works:http://www.hfield.com/the-wi-fire/platform-compatibility/mac/

The beta driver (WCM_Beta_Installer121908.zip) works fine, with some minor issues only. I wonder why hfield makes it so difficult to find working Mac drivers.

The gain in signal strength wasn't as great as I expected, compared to built-in Airport Extreme, but I am still experimenting.

@Joe: I can assure you that I tried very hard to get this thing working, and I can assure you that hField seemed equally uninterested in troubleshooting or making it work when I contacted them about the various problems I had with it. Obviously I'm not alone, judging from the other comments here.

Before you go impugning my efforts in writing this review, I suggest you read some of the other reviews I've written. It's very difficult for a product to be so bad as to earn a "Rotten" rating from me, and probably equally difficult for a product to earn an "Excellent".

@Alex K: It's good to hear that hField is apparently still working on their drivers. The tech support folks I corresponded with a year ago said that they knew of some "issues" with the driver (in my book, "totally failing to work" is a lot more serious than the word "issue" suggests) and hoped to have them fixed in the next beta version, for which they were unwilling to specify a release timeframe.

I'm guessing from the filename that the driver you mention is from December '08. If I knew where the thing was, I'd dig it out and give it another shot with those drivers, just to see if it's at least functional. I hope for their sake that it is.

"We will release a new driver soon", that's what the hfield rep told me more than 6 months ago!!! Soon is a so vague word you know, maybe they wait for the next OS X version... I suggest all of you to write them what you think about their driver at http://www.hfield.com/contact/ linking to this web site so they will know there is more than urgency to build a decent and non bugged version of the driver, after all this piece of hardware works well on XP.

Let's show them that we Mac users have a slice of the market share and demand a decent driver or why not a GNU/GPL version so we can fix it our way.

man you need to look around to find a driver from another company: the Zydaschipset is used in the wi-fire and you can download it from various placeslike here:http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=c4ba5825965dc4150de4fc1039a0167467d69ae8601dbd355621d66e282a0ee8

This chipset is used in the Wi-Fire product by hfield -> http://www.hfield.com/ but sadly since I've bought it, it was impossible to get a good enough driver for this piece of hardware, see http://www.atpm.com/14.03/wi-fire.shtml

The wi-fire is still sold but basically Mac Users don't have a decent driver to let it run (it can't even install on latest Snow Leopard) and can't enjoy the same stability as Windows users, neither get all the options working (encryption schemes supported are far fewer than on Windows).

It has been reported that Atheros has bought Zydas and the page where I've found your email confirms this -> http://www.atheros.com/RD/

Would you like to get in contact with hfield and provide them with the technical expertise to get this driver developed please?

Thanks for everybody using the wi-fire on Macs with Tiger and upper version of OS X (Intel and PPC).

Regards.

********

Maybe some user should push them to support hfield? You can get info there: http://www.atheros.com/RD/